


Hold This

by Beth Harker (Beth_Harker)



Category: Newsies (1992)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-24
Updated: 2015-09-24
Packaged: 2019-09-29 20:53:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17210756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beth_Harker/pseuds/Beth%20Harker
Summary: Bumlets finds a lost child, and enlists Dutchy to help him get her reunited with her family.





	Hold This

“Here, hold this.” Bumlets thrust his pocket handkerchief at the crying child before him, glad he’d gotten into the habit of carrying one. Unfortunately the little girl didn’t laugh at the sight of it the way a lot of the fellows did, but instead let out the most pitiful wail Bumlets had ever heard. She was hiding behind a trashcan at the back of an alley, with a look of fear on her face like that of a cornered animal.

“No, no… Don’t cry. It’s fine,” Bumlets went on a little frantically, kneeling next to the girl. She could not have been more than three years old. Her bare feet were both blackened with grime from the New York streets, and an angry red, because it was such a hot day that you could probably fry an egg on the pavement.

“I want to help you,” Bumlets tried. “Where do you live? I can help you find your mother.” His voice was slow and soft, but it was all to no avail. The child kept screaming.

“Hey, come on now… Everybody’s going to think that I’m a monster if you don’t be quiet. They’ll think I’m trying to hurt you.” The girl continued to scream. Bumlets turned from her with a longing gaze at the streets behind him. He started to stand up, looked at the child again, and then sighed. She had ratty dishwater blonde hair, pale blue eyes, and splotchy red skin. She was was completely and utterly alone. There was no way he could just leave.

Bumlets proffered his handkerchief again, only to have her back away. It was the nicest thing he owned, and if that wouldn’t make her be calm and speak to him, he didn’t know what would. He dug in his pocket. He had a key to his mother’s home, several pennies, a nickel, and a packet of strawberry hard candies that he’d been planning to give to his sisters. He debated what he could give the girl. Little kids were baffling up until they reached the age of five or six, and they were just as likely to choke on a candy as to eat it. Bumlets knew this, because by this point his parents had had enough other children to essentially crowd him out of their apartment. Keys were also potential choking hazards, and coins were just the right size fit up the nose of a sufficiently determined baby.

The handkerchief was the only option. Bumlets waved it around in front of the girl’s face. Maybe it would get her attention. He’d tried something similar with a kitten once, and the kitten had been even younger than the child in front of him.

The girl whimpered, blinked, and then turned to face the wall, clamping her tiny hands over her eyes. Maybe she was afraid of catching germs from the thing that Bumlets used to wipe his nose, or maybe she was just afraid in general. Either way, Bumlets was the only thing blocking her from the wider, scarier world beyond the alley, and he didn’t see any way out of continuing to do it.

—–

An hour later and Bumlets was no longer worried that he’d get blamed for harassing the little girl. Instead, he was really and truly disgusted that nobody had said a word to either of them, with the exception of a well dressed boy, about the same age as Bumlets himself, who had thrown a rock at them and then tried to explain to his lady companion that the newsies were always lying to sell their papers. That was why Bumlets usually avoided this area of town, even if some other kids, like Snipeshooter and Jake, swore by it.

Bumlets wasn’t talking anymore, and neither was the girl. He was sitting on his newspapers, and she was curled up a little ways away from him. Bumlets used his handkerchief to wipe the sweat off his forehead. His hair was drenched with it. He took a gulp out of his flask of water, and the little girl looked up at him.

“You want some?” He asked. The girl wasn’t crying anymore, but her lips trembled. He dress was wet. She looked wilted.

“Come on,” Bumlets encouraged. He extended his hand slowly, and the girl inched forward on her hands and knees. She didn’t reach out for the flask, but Bumlets titled it so that some would fall into her mouth and down her chin.

That’s when she started to babble something at Bumlets, who leaned closer to catch the words. She looked straight at him now, and grabbed onto his sleeve in a strange sort of half-lunge half-tumble. Her voice was soft and hoarse from crying, the words rapid-fire and desperate, but Bumlets couldn’t make sense of them, even when she repeated herself several times, and Bumlets found himself wracking his mind for any words he knew in languages other than English and Spanish. Most of them were insults, yelled across the lodging house either in joke or in earnest, but either way, he didn’t think telling a frightened child that she was an asshole in Italian, or a stupid chicken in Dutch could possibly help the situation, even on the off chance that she happened to understand him.

“We could go to the police station,” Bumlets told the baby. “Not that the Bulls are any help to the likes of us. Might get picked up for vagrancy. Damn.”

The little just looked up at Bumlets and repeated the same words she had been saying ever since she’d first decided to open her trap. There was always the lodging house. Kloppman had strict rules against abducting small children, but that wasn’t what Bumlets was doing. Besides, maybe old Kloppman wouldn’t notice.

Bumlets put a hand on the girl’s shoulder experimentally, as if she were a bomb that might detonate at any moment. Whatever else happened, he didn’t want her to start screaming again. She just continued to babble about whatever it was she was babbling about. Bumlets lifted her up in his arms, all the while waiting for things to go wrong, but nothing did. The girl wrapped her arm around his neck, and rested her head on his shoulder. Bumlets guessed that all that crying had finally taken its toll.

There was no way that Bumlets was going to manage to carry both his papers and the child, so he left those behind, and began to make his way back to the lodge.

 

———-

“She’s speaking German,” Dutchy informed the small group of boys who had made it back to the lodging house a whole hour before super. Skittery was there, along with Tumbler and Specs. Bumlets was just glad to have some help.“

"Yeah. That’s great. Thank you. But where does she come from and what does she want?”

“Kinda hard to tell…”

“Thought you was Dutch,” Skittery interrupted. “Since when do you speak…”

“Ain’t I told you he’s a astro-psychic back in Holland? That means he speaks all the languages,” said Specs. Dutchy always looked nervous when Specs started going on like that, and his ears turned pink. Bumlets guessed that Specs was being friendly, but it was the kind of friendly that made Dutchy squirm.

“The girl…” Bumlets tried to remind them.

“What I don’t get,” said Skittery, “is why they call the country Holland but the language Dutch. Anyone wanna fill me in on that?”

“It’s ‘cause if the language weren’t Dutch, then we’d be stuck calling our pal Dutchy over here by a different name, like Holly for instance, and that’d just sound stupid. Can’t go around giving stupid names to a certified genius. Did I ever tell ya about how when Dutchy was back in Holland he once…”

“She wants to play in the water fountain!” Dutchy almost shouted. He looked right at Specs while he said it, in a way that proved that kids with funny looking glasses could glare just as effectively as anybody else if they really wanted to.

“Can you ask her where she lives?” Bumlets asked. “We should take her back before it gets dark.”

A few words passed between Dutchy and the girl, before Dutchy looked up at the other newsies, “all she’s got to say is that she wants to go to the water fountain.”

“Me too,” exclaimed Tumbler. “Hey, Skits, let’s go drop her off at the water fountain, and stop for a swim while we’re at it.”

“Works for me,” said Skittery. “She’ll be happy, and someone’s bound to find her there. If she doesn’t drown. Huh. On second thought, maybe we can’t just leave her in the fountain.”

“Good to know, genius,” Bumlets couldn’t help but mutter.

“Hey! I thought we agreed that Dutchy was the only genius around here!”

“Specs!” This time Dutchy was so loud that the little girl jumped and scurried away from him. “Sorry.” He let out a heavy breath, raked his fingers through his hair, and then turned his full attention back to the girl.

“You ever considered just bringing the kid back to your ma?” Skittery asked, while Dutchy and the kid were talking.

“Add another to the collection, and Eva is going to have to strike out on her own. She’s almost thirteen now, you know.” Bumlets didn’t look at Skittery as he spoke. He leaned in closer to Dutchy, trying to follow this conversation that he couldn’t understand. He just hoped that the girl didn’t claim to live in the fountain or something silly like that.

“I’ve got the address!” Dutchy announced, with a beaming smile. “Come on, let’s go!”

————–

That’s how Bumlets and Dutchy ended up walking nearly an hour towards the very outskirts of Manhattan, down by the Brooklyn Bridge, though thankfully not across it. Dutchy had made the decision to limit the expedition to the two of them, rather than risk scaring the girl’s mother with a whole horde of newsboys. Privately, Bumlets guessed that Dutchy had had enough of Specs making an example of him for one day.

“We’re lucky you know German,” Bumlets said politely as they walked.

“Yeah. There’s lotsa German kids around. It helps I guess.”

They were mostly quiet after that. Bumlets was glad of that. There was usually enough chatter back at the lodge to drive a guy out of his mind. Dutchy and Bumlets took turns carrying the little girl, who had fallen asleep.   
Turned out she lived on the eleventh floor of a crowded tenement that smelled of sauerkraut and boiled meat. The first door that Bumlets and Dutchy tried was wrong, but that didn’t matter. The missing child had been causing panic all over, at least from what Dutchy said. Bumlets couldn’t understand the words spoken, but the crowd of people that gathered as the two of them climbed the stairs made it pretty clear that the child in Bumlets’ arms had been well sought after. The whole thing was strangely like leading a parade, right up until they got to the girl’s house, placed the child in her mother’s arms, and then the parade overtook them, all talking and laughing at once, and crowding the woman and her baby so that Bumlets and Dutchy were forced to the back.

Dutchy clapped his hands and barked out a laugh.

“What is it?” Bumlets asked.

“Nothin’. They’re all just real happy. You wanna get going?”

Bumlets looked around, wondering if anybody was going to speak to him, but then again, he supposed he wouldn’t be able to answer if they did.

“How’s it feel to be a hero?” Dutchy asked, arm around his shoulder as they descended the stairs.

“Hard to say. Not a bad change, but I don’t think I could make a living out of it.”


End file.
